Welcome to my online Chinese learning diary! I will include what I've been learning and links to sources and tools that help me in my quest to become bilingual.

Monday, May 7

An Update

Still here.

My wife had surgery a couple of weeks ago and I was home taking care of her 24/7. With all that time you would think I would have really worked on my studies for ChinesePod right?

Wrong!

You underestimate how much I hate to study.

There were moments of discovery in that time, when sentence structures that Vera asked me to work on clicked in my mind. But then there were other things.

Today she asked me to translate "I never...". Well, I knew the rest of the words and the structure but forgot how to say "never" (my wife would concur) and just shut down at that point. Mental block.

It's true. I hate to study. My mother recently told me that I was gifted but easily bored. I asked if she meant gifted in the shortbus way or bright and she assured me she meant bright. I was in all the advanced classes in High School but did terrible because I hated the classes. Instead I went home and read Steinbeck and King (Stephen).

So Vera (and Kai), I give you my apologies, I am a terrible student.

Oh yes, an update on the 8 week course. Well, not much to report since China had a week long national holiday which meant no calls for a week. We started back today and I did terrible.

Speaking of starting back today I went back to work for the first time in 11 days (hey, when I said Jenn couldn't do anything I wasn't kidding!). The combined stress of being back at work and having studied very little for the lesson tonight almost gave me a coronary.